Our
society has an aversion to giving credit to the rich, or royalty, a kind of
latent political correctness, visible in that
Robin Hood, the
commoner, or so generally portrayed, has had at least half a dozen movies
made, while his lord,
Richard the Lionhearted, has none that I know of;
maybe one back in the old days when we were willing to recognize greatness
among aristocrats, other than
Princess Diane: Or it could be that
movie writers, producers, etc. are just lazy when it comes to developing new
material; after all the Invasion of the
Body Snatchers, a pretty lightweight
sci-fi plot, has also been produced at least three times, each time
admittedly better, but don't we deserve something new rather than retreads?

So
why Richard?: Well, he is special in so many ways, most people being
completely unaware of it, their knowledge of him
limited to the legend that he was Robin's king, and that he also was gay;
both uncertain, but what the heck, if you say it authoritatively,
most people won't do the research to challenge you. Gay, or not;
Robin, or not; there are a lot of interesting facets of Richard which could
make great cinema material. Start with his mother being
Eleanor of
Aquitaine, famous for her court being the generator of the courtly love
concept, debatable; and an early beacon of letters and enlightenment, not
debatable; from the days of Richard's grandfather, William; all three of
them patrons of the arts, song and poetry, and the troubadour. Where
do you want to go next?: His struggle against his father to gain the thrones
of
Angevin and England, his defeat and pardon by his father, the arrest and
imprisonment of his mother by his father, largely for her encouragement of
the sons to revolt against their father; or the launch of the Third Crusade,
full of challenges, from the logistics of troop movement; the
duplicity of his partner and enemy Phillip of France, a wolf waiting for
Richard to be locked into the conflict in
Outremer
(Palestine), so he could
swoop down and capture the Angevin territories in France; or lastly the long
journey home from Palestine, something akin to the story of
Odysseus,
escaping by sea, then by land, his enemies in hot pursuit, their allies
laying traps in front of him, finally capturing and imprisoning him at
Dürnstein
Castle on the Danube River, where his loyal troubadour finally
located him 18 months later; then the rush to England to preserve his
kingdom from his brother John and John's ally, Phillip of France.
All this does not mention his audacity as a warrior, causing
Saladin to
characterize him as a fool for the risks he took in battle, and causing any
Saracen to fear meeting him in battle.

As
far as fertile ground, cinema wise, can't the movie makers generate
something out of the mystery and intrigue of the early
Templars under
Hughes
de Payne. If you can have Indiana Jones and the Raider of the Lost
Ark, geeze, why can't you pull something together about the real raider, at
least legend wise, and the dig under the Temple Mount. This subject
has been pursued heavily in the New Age science, the story line made popular
by the De Vinci Code. The quick summary of it being that the Templars were
organized specifically to find something of religious significance under the
Temple Mount; they did, and in the process they became jaded about Jesus's
divinity, and became enamored with something else, probably a religious view
similar to that of the early Jewish Christians, which placed
John the
Baptist as the teacher of the true faith. There seems to be a connection
between what they believed and Kabbalah, being that there is a modern
similarity between the Kabbalah and Masonry, that coming from
the Templars, researched in a
series of books written by Lomas
and
Knight as well
as those by
Baigent and
Leigh.

Lastly my interest in the
Assassins
began to bud when, as a child heavily
interested in historical heroes, before they got deconstructed into
anti-heroes, discredited by dalliances with slave women, other men,
alcohol, drugs or anything else that the deconstructionists could fling and
stick to them: well so what, they're still heroes, maybe even greater, since
as such they are just men overcoming all of those distractions while keeping
directed enough to achieve a greatness that their detractors never touched.

So in
those days of childhood fantasy, I read a little of the mysterious Man in the
Mountain, and his Assassin Cult that terrorized Christian and Muslim alike.
More recently, researching for the third book, The Seekers of the Scroll, I
learned that the Assassins were an offshoot of Islam, heretics to the
main stream, who fought against their oppression through the mechanism of
assassinating those who sought to destroy them; although sometimes they
assassinated for hire, gaining temporary alliances with the enemies of those
whom they terminated. Their heretical believes seemed to have some
ubiquity, in that there was an underground diffusion of it through the Muslim culture,
this based on
the tale that they proved their power to Saladin; one entering his
tent, drawing a sword, while Saladin's body guards turned their backs,
leaving the general to the mercy of the Assassin, who simply warned
the general that he would be dead anytime that they decided he should die.
I don't think he ever led a campaign against them.